Flyers fire Laviolette, name Berube new coach

PHILADELPHIA — Flyers general manager Paul Holmgren was said to be close to firing Peter Laviolette last season, but held off and thought better of it over the offseason. In the words Monday of his two bosses, Peter Luukko and Ed Snider, Holmgren just felt Laviolette deserved “a chance” to prove that last season’s playoff miss was something of an anomaly.

That chance lasted three regular-season games.

Laviolette was officially dismissed early Monday morning. He was replaced by assistant coach Craig Berube, who began his Flyers career more than 25 years ago as a young enforcer out of the minors with limited skills.

“Craig is one of the smartest hockey guys I’ve ever been around,” Holmgren said. “He demands respect. He holds people accountable. He’s a no-BS kind of a guy. He has some work to do. He understands that. Things have to get better and they will.”

Whether they do or don’t, there is plenty of speculation that the club is working to make a trade to upgrade the offense. No matter what personnel moves are to be made in the coming days, if the Flyers don’t improve significantly this season over their playoff miss of a short season, Holmgren might be next in line to get a fond farewell.

For now, however, the fallen ax has taken out only a coach who wears a Stanley Cup ring.

“You look at last season, it was a lockout year, we had some injuries. I think we had to give Peter a chance,” Luukko said. “He’s a (heck) of a coach. He’s going to be a good coach somewhere else. He’s great, he has a great family, he’s going to be great in the community. To err on the side of making sure, it was the right thing to do. I applaud Paul for (waiting). You don’t want to just make rash decisions.”

Three games into a season still seems pretty rash. But Laviolette was scratched from the organization after the Flyers’ 2-1 defeat to the Carolina Hurricanes Sunday, a game in which they were outshot, 34-18.

That came on the heels of a 4-1 defeat in Montreal Saturday, a 3-1 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs at home in the season-opener the prior Wednesday...and a 1-5-1 preseason that didn’t exactly impress the biggest boss of them all.

“I really wasn’t happy last year,” Flyers chairman Ed Snider said. “We blamed it on a lot of issues. I thought those issues were valid and felt Peter deserved an opportunity to (return). He’s a great coach, a great guy and works his butt off. But I felt training camp, quite frankly, was one of the worst training camps I’ve ever seen. And I’m not talking about (preseason) wins and losses. There was nothing exciting. Nobody shot. Nobody looked good. I couldn’t point to one thing that I thought was a positive coming out of training camp, and personally I was worried. Unfortunately, my worries were realized in the first three games, scoring one goal in each game and looking disorganized.

“It wasn’t just the three losses,” Snider concluded, “it’s the way they played in the three losses. They looked lost.”

It is the second-fastest firing in NHL history. Detroit fired Bill Gadsby after two games in 1969. More recently, the Chicago Blackhawks replaced Denis Savard after a 1-2-1 start to the 2008-09 season.

“On making this change at such an early part of the season, I can go back a little bit to last year and my concerns on how the team played,” Holmgren said. “Looking back, it was a lockout-shortened year. We had a lot of injuries. I thought it was important that Peter had another shot with a training camp. And some of the additions we made this summer were good additions in Ray Emery, Vinny Lecavalier and Mark Streit. I thought there was some excitement about our team going into training camp. And right from Day 1 at training camp I was concerned about it, about how the team looked.

“Oh-and-3 is 0-3 and we still have a long way to go in terms of the season. But it was more about how the team played. It was unacceptable. We didn’t look like a team at all.”

Holmgren repeatedly stressed that while he’s fired the head coach, along with assistant coach Kevin McCarthy — a former Flyer who was part of Laviolette’s Cup-winning staff in Carolina in 2006 — he’s placing a large portion of the blame for the poor start on his players. That said, when asked if he was leaving the door open to a major roster move because of that, Holmgren said, “Not really. But this is a drastic move for sure, and we’ll see how it goes.”

Asked if Holmgren’s job status was more of an issue now, Snider said, “No. I think Paul did an excellent job over the summer with the three players (Vinny Lecavalier, Ray Emery, Mark Streit) he brought in. We had extremely high hopes for those three players. We still do. It remains to be seen if we were right or wrong.”

Laviolette replaced the fired John Stevens early in the 2009-10 season and wound up leading the club to the Stanley Cup finals before losing to the Chicago Blackhawks in six games. He had led them back to the playoffs the next two seasons, but missed the playoffs after a league lockout last season.

“We expect to make the playoffs and we expect to win,” Holmgren said.

Laviolette first was a head coach in the league with the New York Islanders, taking over a moribund franchise and leading it back to the playoffs. He would move on to Carolina and coach the Hurricanes to a Stanley Cup in 2006. He was not immediately available for comment Monday. But Snider was. Asked about his club’s 38 years since their last Stanley Cup championship under Fred Shero, and its prolific history of needing to hire 15 head coaches since then, Snider said, “The bottom line is we work our (butt) off to win and we have won more than our fair share, but we haven’t won Cups. But we have been in the finals for the Cup many times.

“If you really want me to get into details, I think we got screwed several times,” Snider added. “But it wasn’t that long ago that we were in the finals against Chicago, and everybody saw ‘the goal.’

“These things happen to us. Sometimes I say, ‘Somebody is home sticking pins in a doll somewhere.’”